MoMA’s Fifth Annual Film Benefit Honors Quentin Tarantino

Diane Kruger assumed the podium in the Roy and Niuta Titus Theater at the Museum of Modern Art to pay tribute to Quentin Tarantino, this year’s honoree at MoMA’s Film Benefit. “Finally, a director who allows his leading ladies to be bold, to be fearless, to kick butt,” said the Inglourious Basterds actress, looking rather fearless herself in floor-length tiered Prabal Gurung chiffon. She turned the podium over to Peter Bogdanovich who warned the audience that Tarantino’s forthcoming Django Unchained is the director’s best film yet, calling it, “the shortest long Western since Rio Bravo, one of our mutual favorites.” Django stars Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz smiled from the first few rows. In the audience Chelsea Clinton and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, held hands, while others including Harvey Weinstein and Georgina Chapman (cochairs for the evening), Harvey Keitel, Steve Buscemi, Katie Holmes, John Slattery, Josh Lucas and Hannah Bronfman listened attentively. Finally Tarantino took the stage, introduced by MoMA film director Raj Roy, and recalled his first visit to New York—a casting trip for Reservoir Dogs—with Keitel as guide: “Touring New York with Harvey Keitel is like touring Texas with John Wayne. It was incredible.”

One could say the same about Monday night. After the presentation, guests headed upstairs to the mezzanine to a meal of tricolored roasted beet salad and braised beef short ribs. Sculptural rhomboid vases perched on Lucite pedestals held explosions of boxwoods and speakers were outfitted as white plaster obelisks soon to come in handy: Before the warm Apple Charlotte was served, Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA performed a slew of songs to a besotted audience. Foxx sat at a center table and bobbed his head with deep concentration, as his dinner partner, Kruger, swayed and rapped her fingers on her Charlotte Olympia domino clutch. Others soon followed suit—you could call it a domino effect.